Night of the Bookers: David Szalay and Susan Choi

Following the global success of two extraordinary literary works, join us for a glittering night of words as we host internationally acclaimed authors Susan Choi and David Szalay here in Canberra!

Booker Prize 2025 winner David Szalay will discuss his latest novel Flesh – a hypnotic and propulsive work about a Hungarian man swept up to live alongside London’s super-rich. Flesh confronts profound questions about what drives a life, what makes it worth living, and what ultimately breaks it.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025, Susan Choi’s critically acclaimed novel Flashlight traces the sweeping story of one family caught in the currents of the twentieth century from Japan to the United States to the North Korean regime. This monumental new work from the National Book Award-winning author spans decades and continents in a spellbinding, deeply moving exploration of family, loss, memory, and the unseen forces that shape our lives.

Susan and David will appear in conversation with Canberra’s much-loved Nigel Featherstone, read from their work and discuss their writing lives.  Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear two of today’s most compelling literary voices in conversation and enjoy a celebration of Booker Prize excellence! 

Flashlight – Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood

Flesh - 'Brilliance on every page' Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital

David Szalay is the author of six works of fiction, including London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes, All That Man Is, for which he was awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Turbulence, which won the Edge Hill Prize. Born in Canada, he grew up in London, and now lives in Vienna. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Susan Choi is the author of the novels Flashlight, Trust Exercise, My Education, A Person of Interest, American Woman and The Foreign Student. She has won the National Book Award for Fiction, the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award and a Lambda Literary Award and has been a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. Flashlight began as a short story and received the Sunday Times Short Story Award. Susan Choi lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Nigel Featherstone is a writer for the page, stage, and music. His most recent work is The Story of the Oars, a play with spoken songs, which had its world premiere at The Street Theatre, Canberra, in 2025. Nigel’s novels include Bodies of Men, which was longlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize, runner-up for the ACT Book of the Year, and shortlisted in the Queensland Literary Awards. His short works have been published in Review of Australian Fiction, Meanjin and Griffith Review, among other journals, and his poetry has recently been shortlisted for the ACU Prize for Poetry and the Newcastle Poetry Prize. A former ACT Artist of the Year, Nigel currently writes book reviews for Guardian Australia.